The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787Quotes
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515